Derived Environment Effects and Consistency of Exponence

In this article, I defend the assumption that the generator function Gen of Optimality Theory should be restricted by a principle called Consistency of Exponence and I show how this assumption helps us understand so-called Derived Environment Effects.1 Consistency of Exponence was introduced almost in some of the earliest work on Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince, 1993, 1994) as a reasonable restriction on the way the phonology works, and in particular on the way it interacts with the lexical specification of morphemes.2 Over the course of the past 15 years, very few explicit arguments have been provided against it — those that have will be discussed in section 1.3 — and we will show in section 1.2 that several well-known families of constraints are dependent on it. Nevertheless, the principle never received the attention it deserved. Here is the original definition: